I bought Eurail passes on-line from RailPlus in Australia. Not sure if they still exist. But you could look through
European Rail travel: options from Rail Europe as the starting point. I made all the ticket purchases and seat bookings on-line and they posted the tickets to me before we departed for the trip. Some of the seat reservations could not be made more than 3 monts out, and we were on a 3 month trip with Europe at the end of the 3 months, so some seats had to be booked on-line once we had left Australia. But that was not a problem - the only restriction is that the Eurail pass is purchased before departing.
We found the trains were a great way to get around Europe. The trains take you right into the city centres so we managed to get around without renting cars and just using public transport of walking once in the cities. We looked for accommodation that was either walking distance from the stations or easily accessible via taxi.
We used trains as follows:
London to Paris on Eurostar
- Paris to Nice
- Nice to Monaco (day-trip while staying at Nice)
- Nice to Pisa
- Pisa to Rome
- Rome to Venice
- Venice to Luzern
- Luzern to Salzburg
- Salzburg to Berlin
I recommend paying the extra to reserve seats rather than just boarding the train and looking for an unreserved seat. But we were travelling as a party of 7 people so reserved seating was necessary to ensure we could sit together. We booked the "panoramic" carriage for the trip up through the Alps which was very spectacular.
I found using the trains was much less stressful than driving in countries where I could read all the road signs. If you choose to drive, then I stringly recommend begging a hand-held GPS with Europe maps.